Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday August 13, 2010 @02:14PM
from the long-live-illumos dept.

ywlke writes "A few hours ago, an internal Oracle memo was leaked to the osol-discuss mailing list at opensolaris.org. It details Oracle's plans for Solaris and OpenSolaris; namely that OpenSolaris, the distribution, is dead. Solaris Express has come back from the grave, and source code will still be CDDL, but won't be released to the public until some time after it is incorporated into a binary release. What happens to the community now is anybody's guess."
The full text of the memo is available on the mailing list, as well as apparent confirmation from an Oracle employee. That said, no official announcement has yet been made.

I thought it was a new O'Reily title and this was a book review. Doesn't that sound like a title of a book? The Animal on the cover would be some old Gypsy looking into a crystal ball.

Never mind.

lol;) but TFA

Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leadingshare of business applications on Solaris today, including both SPARCand x64.

With everything going on at SC-Oracle these days , really sounds like they are wayyyyyy to full of themselves ok I will give them the SPARC , but #1 Enterprise ?? Depends on what.. So many of our customers that we had on Solaris have gotten so scared (over these last few months , because of the Oracle aquisition ( and I am talking paying Enterprise customers, not open) we have had to move them to AIX or linux, depending. Sad day for Solaris in general imho.

So that Oracle can sue me into oblivion for copyright infringement? (See: Java / Android)

And don't tell me that they're different situations - that'll only stay true until Oracle sees an opportunity to 1) crush a perceived competitor in the marketplace, or 2) take huge sums of money from anybody using their technologies who isn't already paying huge sums of money for the privilege.

Most of OpenSolaris was under the CDDL, which provides protection from patent claims from Sun (now Oracle). So if you used OpenSolaris, they wouldn't have a case through copyright infringement -- it's an approved open-source license -- or through patents they hold. Reality is complicated, so it's always a good idea to read the license code is released under: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php [opensource.org]

In other words: your concern about OpenSolaris specifically is unfounded. DalvikVM wasn't make by Sun and r

I'm a little suspicious of the apparent over-simplicity of the interpretation I'm about to lay out here, but I temper that with the understanding that this is marketing math.

"top customers" == "Oracle's enterprise customers".

40% of Oracle's enterprise customers are running Oracle (the RDBMS... remember that?) on Solaris. That means that 60% are running Oracle on some other OS. (Linux is prominent in that, I think. Can anyone find some statistics?)

Anyways, that 60% (Oracle on non-Oracle OS) is the "60% growth opportunity" the market-droid is spewing about.

And I'm point out that you're interpreting the marketing statement as someone versed and competent at arithmetic. I'm pointing out that it's marketing math, and therefore needs to be boiled down to 2nd-grade-level.

I was just reading on wikipedia last night that OpenOffice.org is a "limited" version of the office suite, and that most Linux installs (like Ubuntu) actually come with Go O-O instead because it offers full *.docx functionality that OpenOffice.org does not. Is that true?

If so I've been recommending the wrong office suite to friends, coworkers.

I was just reading on wikipedia last night that OpenOffice.org is a "limited" version of the office suite, and that most Linux installs (like Ubuntu) actually come with Go O-O instead because it offers full *.docx functionality that OpenOffice.org does not. Is that true?

Go O-O really is a patched version of OpenOffice.org which has more features thanks to these patches. And yes, many GNU/Linux distributions give you Go O-o when you install "OpenOffice.org". The Gentoo ebuild for app-office/openoffice is, for example, the Go O-o version. OpenOffice.org is "limited" in the sense that you can get more features by applying patches who give more features, which is a result of it being very hard to get patches into this project.

That's really interesting. Apparently OpenOffice.org + a useful patchset has been the norm for some distributions of Linux for some time, and there are builds for other platforms (Windows included) as well.

OpenSolaris distributions were a joke. They would have been fine back in the 90s when it was acceptable for a free UNIX to feel unpolished, incomplete and buggy because even the commercial ones were that way.

Now with other free (as in cost) clones feeling polished and professional, and OSX being user friendly and pretty, theres absolutely no execuse for a company to allow someething like OpenSolaris to exist.

All OpenSolaris ever did was make me feel like Solaris was going backwards rather than forwards, I'm pretty sure I never had an install that 'worked' properly, there was ALWAYS something wrong. Same hardware runs Linux and FreeBSD fine, so its not the hardwares fault. My fault... maybe, but considering I used to admin solaris boxes a few years back its not like I was completely clueless.

If Solaris Express feels like it used to feel in relation to everything it had around it, then it'll be a great improvement.

The only reasons I would use Solaris at this point are:

I want to use high end Sun hardware, meh, probably unlikely at this point.

I want a UNIX that doesn't feel like it was thrown together by a bunch of people on the Internet, a coherent experience.

I would run Solaris for the same reason I run Mac OSX, I want a professional feeling polished OS. I want to get things done, not play UNIX admin to accomplish what should be trivial tasks. The only time I should see a commandline is when I need to do something completely out of the ordinary.

Sadly, it seems that Linux's popularity killed Solaris, not because one was better or worse than the other, but because Solaris tried to act like it was Linux and just failed completely because Linux's real advantage is the surprising number of people that treat it like a god, they are a useful resource as we all know. No one will probably ever feel that way about Solaris so its just never going to get the support Linux gets from people without it having SOMETHING Linux doesn't have.

There are some excellent technologies in OpenSolaris, and it appears The Illumos Project [illumos.org] is going to be the place to find them.

I'm not sure this is a bad thing. Oracle's played its hand, and as opposed to Sun's years of "oh, gosh, we don't know if we want to be open or not - how about almost-open?" Oracle said, "screw you guys, we're going to make money off this thing." I frankly don't care about them not releasing an OpenSolaris binary build - Linus doesn't post binary builds - but keeping the source changes secret until after the commercial release just doesn't deal with the realities of Internet Time.

But, because of Oracle's decisiveness, the ON stack, the libc, etc. are all being done right now. I've tried once or twice to contribute to Nexenta and got stuck in the complexity of rebuilding a kernel, despite having done so in linux forever (to be fair the Nexenta guys were awesomely responsive so I didn't really have to do the build myself). This should be fixed.

It might give the OpenSolaris^W Illumos community a chance to succeed, being actually open.

It might give the OpenSolaris^W Illumos community a chance to succeed, being actually open.

And that may be the sole bright spot in this sad saga. An opportunity to cleanly and distinctively fork, so there's clearly Oracle Solaris and Illumos Open Solaris. The weird, coy, half-open thing the community had before was a losing proposition.

I'd had high hopes for Sun's stuff back in '85. But even before being eaten by Oracle they always seemed to be roadblocking any attempt to work with the guts of their system, even for internal use only. Meanwhile, Linux made good on the GNU promise and the freeing of BSD provided an additional open alternative OS (at least three of 'em if you count the project splits as distinct).

I abandoned Solaris on the last of my own machines for Y2K, rather than shell out for upgrades. (Only Linux machines at home at the moment - except for one firewalled-off Windows machine for my wife to run student-Autocad and certain true Windows applications for classwork.)

Some Open Solaris fans tried to claim things were more open than I perceived them to be. But this development underscores the correctness of my choice.

Some Open Solaris fans tried to claim things were more open than I perceived them to be. But this development underscores the correctness of my choice.

They were never open. Sun came up with OpenSolaris because they were losing out big time to Linux suppliers and it was a feeble attempt to make Solaris look 'open source' when they were selling it without Sun giving up any control at all.

Frankly, I applaud Oracle for finally being open with everybody rather than continuing Sun's sham. Now it and SPARC can

So what does that mean for the OpenSolaris connumity? Will Illumos [slashdot.org] wait for the delayed source code updates and try to stay a "spork"? Or will they decide to go it on their own (fork) and try keep as much compatibility as they can? It is definitely not a good situation for the OpenSolaris community.

Knowing Oracle it was obvious from the day the acquisition was announced that:1) Oracle will cripple, keep on life support or close-source all open source projects. Larry believes anything users want to use is worth making them pay for. Any open source projects that survive will be strategically useful (like letting a 'free' MySQL contaminate Microsoft's low-midrange database business revenue)

2) Java is what Oracle really wanted in Sun acquisition (see announcement today of lawsuit against Google re Android Java use) and Solaris is useful only insofar as it is part of the value prop for selling Sun, now Oracle, hardware. Solaris will only be pushed by Oracle on non-Oracle hardware if they can make a good license business out of it. Expect that all use of Java in open source implementations will dry up and any commercial implementations will be expected to start pushing license dollars back to Oracle (Which is why somebody at IBM should have been shot for blowing the Sun acquisition over the few measly millions they were fighting over before Oracle pulled the rug out form under IBM -it could have been Oracle kneeling in front of IBM instead of IBM watching the underlying architecture of Websphere and everything else Java based owned by their biggest competitor)

3) Open Solaris was a way to enable a user community (not really a dev community like Linux has) but since it can't be licensed (for money) and there's no really support/services business and it certainly doesn't help sell any Sun/Oracle hardware (which generally always runs the commercial Solaris) it has no place in an Oracle world.

No. VB complements the Xen/OracleVM offer. I know for a fact that it's extensively used inside Oracle itself. They'll just add features to facilitate integration between VB and OVM (i.e. develop on VB, deploy on OVM).

Seeing Open Solaris killed off was fairly obvious. However combine the fact that they sued Google over Java issues raises interesting thoughts.

These moves and inevitably others are already having consequences. Java as a platform for consumer products is now no longer a given. The assent of Android as the" platform of choice of hardware and software vendors puts Nokia, RIM / HP back in the picture. When just days ago they were an after thought in developers eyes.

I've seen it before. People put business distant between them selves and anything with a lawsuit potential. So is the law suit over Java going to cause a massive migration away from Java?

What is Solaris's future. I think it's rather short less than 10 years left. Price per grunt the upstart Linux is kicking it's butt despite all the very nice features of Sparc and Solaris

correct. zfs was the only thing I cared about (for home use) on solaris.

its 'ok' on freebsd but not all that fast (in my experience, compared to linux md-raid, which I do realize is not at all the same exact thing).

but solaris was THE de-facto reference implementation of zfs.

kind of sorry to lose that. the rest: meh, no great loss to non-enterprise computing. and enterprise computing will still be buying solaris when they need this level of features and support (mostly the support side).

That's an understatement. Some of the performance metrics on FreeBSD 8.1 ZFS are so poor that they're not even comparable to OSol. A 10th the performance, maybe?

Nevermind the FreeBSD implementation is shoddy, at best in terms of stability and hardware utilization in other areas: high CPU, high memory use, a couple versions behind 'official' ZFS, inexplicable instability (particularly when the filesystem is nearing capacity, but I had my test fbsd zfs system reboot itself - twice - during bonnie++ tests), and a handful of other matters.

And no, don't tell me "it'll be fixed in the next version via higher pool version support". Fix what you did before implementing something new.

Each new major version of FreeBSD since 6 seems to have taken a couple steps back where there shouldn't have been change until it worked (USB, I'm looking at you). FreeBSD is awesome for network devices and code projects, but it's kinda a wretched nightmare as a general purpose or storage OS.

ZFS in OpenSolaris is a huge loss. I just hope it's continued onward - albeit a little bit behind "official" solaris - in Nexenta and the other derivative projects. Is that even possible, legally speaking?

I run Xen, all of my Xen disks are just zvols. I accidentally screwed one up, just rolled it back to the last version. Because of the deduplication, I only 'used' the data that had changed.

Since it's a server, I guess I'll be one of the last to turn the lights out when something finally comes along to replace it. Xen was cake to get running (compared to Linux). It runs a Debian machine and an XP machine. Seemed adequately fast.

I'm running ZFS with Solaris 10 on a SAN, and while I really like ZFS, I'm anxiously awaiting btrfs and will migrate to Linux the moment btrfs hits stable in RHEL 6. ZFS is good, but that doesn't mean that other file systems like btrfs don't have the potential to be better and cheaper.

There certainly wasn't a "community" for it. The vast majority were Sun employees doing their job. Linux trounced Solaris because everyone could play, Sun took way too long to realize this. No one is surprised Oracle is doing this, they make money from being an expensive closed shop. It'll be interesting to see what happens with InnoDB and MySQL in the coming months/years. Oracle are suing Google over JAVA, making people in that environment rather nervous too.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with InnoDB and MySQL in the coming months/years.

IMHO? MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity. Oracle isn't going to do much with it at the risk of making a free competitor to their flagship product even better.

It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up. MAYBE one of those will take off, but my guess is that without the brand recognition of MySQL to go behind them, PostgreSQL will slurp up a lot of those users.

That said, for better or for worse (worse IMHO, but that's just my opinion) "no-SQL" databases like CouchDB and MongoDB seem to be gaining a lot of traction. They won't likely take over completely as there are some things that just work better in a traditional relational database, but my guess is that a lot of smaller projects that once would have used MySQL will be looking at those instead.

IMHO? MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity. Oracle isn't going to do much with it at the risk of making a free competitor to their flagship product even better.

It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up. MAYBE one of those will take off, but my guess is that without the brand recognition of MySQL to go behind them, PostgreSQL will slurp up a lot of those users.

I really do hope that MySQL is successfully forked. Postgre is ok, but it is too different from MySQL and that scares a lot of companies who may adopt it.

I am glad to see that Postgre now pays a bit more attention to replication as this is they key feature I will need in order to adopt it. I am very glad my predecessor where I work insisted on us using PDO as database abstraction layer as this will make my migration away from MySQL slightly easier.

I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus. There's very little worthwhile about MySQL, all it had was good marketing and a earlier move to being cross-platform (which is very very important, but as a difference it's gone).

I beg to differ. Postgres is not just "ok" - have you looked at its features and their completeness; standards compliance; scalability (clustering); RBAC; programming flexibility; reliability? If you are a developer - how about size and quality of code, optimizer, query execution flow? Postgres probably has one of the best maintained codebase for a complex piece of software you'll ever see.

In none of the categories above can you even start placing MySQL in the same ballpark as Postgres. It's not even the same league, it's not even the same sport. So, the other part of your sentence is right in a way - it's completely different in these and many other regards from MySQL.

The reason MyISAM (not the whole MySQL) is "fast" is because there is no proper abstraction level between what executes the query and the actual file writes. This is true for simple inserts, simple selects, simple updates. This is also why when MySQL crashes, quite frequently MyISAM tables become corrupt - you can try to repair them, but hopefully you were replicating.

Besides, you use MyISAM for "speed" and you lose basic functionality like transactions, MVCC, ACID compliance (hmm, did you even have it in the first place?), row/page locks, etc. You can perform direct file writes even faster than that, I guess it counts for something, but that doesn't do you any good either.

On the other hand, what kind of "real-world" benchmarks did you do? No such "real world" I know of consists of simple inserts and selects. How about cases for:

I agree, but not for the reasons you state. Brand recognition? Seriously? You think 30 seconds with a google search isn't going to turn up the forks?

It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up.

Except that *all* these forks have a consistent problem: there is no commercial license available. The owners of MySQL could dual-license their works, and people are free to fork the MySQL GPL edition, but they can't then turn around and offer commercial licenses to those who need them. The GPL is a bit "too free" (or too restrictive, depending on your definition of free) to be palatable.

In a strange sort of way, if Oracle doesn't develop MySQL enough, more projects will start with PostgreSQL and will never even consider Oracle. The fact that MySQL sucks as bad as it does works for Oracle, and if they actually kill it, they risk losing revenue!

That said, for better or for worse (worse IMHO, but that's just my opinion) "no-SQL" databases like CouchDB and MongoDB seem to be gaining a lot of traction.

No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over. Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.

Except that *all* these forks have a consistent problem: there is no commercial license available. [...] The GPL is a bit "too free" (or too restrictive, depending on your definition of free) to be palatable.

The fact that MySQL sucks as bad as it does works for Oracle, and if they actually kill it, they risk losing revenue!

IMOHO, the problem with MySQL+Oracle is that it doesn't make sense for anyone but Oracle. The skillset gap between MySQL and Oracle is MASSIVE! So when a project out grows MySQL, its not an automatic Oracle upgrade. Really, what's the incentive other than some very loose association via branding?

On the other hand, PostgreSQL completely encompasses MySQL (required skill sets and capability) and has a huge overlap with Oracle. To get your feet wet with PostgreSQL, the required skill set is only slightly large

Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.

It's more than that: it's also for every case where the lookup logic is NOT handled by the database. Consider when queries are fielded by a separate service, such as a dedicated search engine (e.g. Solr/Lucene [apache.org]), leaving the database is relegated to just primary key lookup for full records/documents. At that time the benefits and tradeoffs offered by the various NoSQL solutions suddenly become a LOT more interesting, because that's what these tools specialize in.

The GPL only apply to somebody if this somebody modify the source code of the software _and_ re-distribute the modified software. Are there examples where somebody would take, for example MariaDB, modify it and re-distribute the modified package to it's customers? The GPL doesn't concern you at all if you, for example, take MariaDB, modify it to run 500% faster and use it on your servers for the next big internet thing. It's also not a big deal if you take MariaDB, modify it for your application and make th

Watch Derby. Small footprint, backed by IBM, some very nice features indeed (efficient backups and table compression can be called while running) and, although it is actually 100% java you do not need java to run it. It is a very nice way to run small, simple databases (like MySQL 3.2x was designed for), but with features like efficient complex joins and easy window selects. Oh yes, and there's a commercial version (Cloudscape). Oracle faffing with MySQL is a gift to IBM.

ZFS seemed pretty interesting. Btrfs might catch up eventually, but for now it's a loss.

That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.

In short the good features of OpenSolaris aren't going to have to be reimplemented, but since we were going to have to do that anyways then it's less disheartening.

That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.

Actually the ZFS storage layer was recently ported to Linux. You can use it with Lustre today, perhaps some databases. The POSIX layer is being worked on.

Due to the licensing conflict, distribution is an open problem. Probably end-users will need to install this themselves.

ZFS is already available on Linux as a user-space filesystem (http://zfs-fuse.net/) - not fast but quite functional.

FreeBSD 8.1 has the best ZFS implementation outside the Solaris kernel at present - not as recent as the Solaris ZFS but it appears to work pretty well. People who want a really point and click install for evaluation or use at home should try PC-BSD 8.1, which is a repackaged version of FreeBSD with GUI installer and simpler package installation, and is still FreeBSD under the covers - see http://www.pcbsd.org/ [pcbsd.org]

However, no matter how great ZFS is, you still need full backups of your ZFS storage, because there are occasions where it refuses to open the storage (zpool) and it has no fsck, by design. I like the design and features, particularly the per-block checksums, media scrubbing and solving the RAID5 write hole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_5_disk_failure_rate), and low cost snapshots - but the 'no data loss by design' ignores the inevitable bugs that do occasionally cause data loss.

ZFS-FUSE is a pretty amazing effort, but it tends to be buggy and big on memory consumption, from what I've read. It's also at the wrong layer.

I have high hopes for ZFS in FreeBSD 9. Due to their compatibility requirements, they can't get zpools > v16 in FreeBSD 8 (and it sounds like it'll only be 15 at this point). If 9 has zpool v23, there will be much rockage.

You might actually try *testing* the Solaris CIFS implementation, not just believing the Sun/Oracle press releases about it. You might find it's a bit.. lacking:-). What's their roadmap timetable for an SMB2 server for example ?

Yes and no. Out of context, your post is almost 'Insightful'. (Or 'Common Sense'.)Within the context, though, ZFS promised no data corruption except at hard disk failure, due to atomic writes. Not wanting to delve into details, there was a devil in the details. If someone really was interested, I could do a write up; but in a nutshell, SUN (ie the developers) didn't deliver on this promise. There are a number of cases, confirmed cases, when a perfect hard disk loses data, actually all data, irrecoverably, w

If only I had mod points, I'd mod you +8 Insightful!Why? Because of your last paragraph. I for one can only warn the potential users of ZFS. There are chances of you losing all your data. Don't believe me? Search all threads of the almost-defunct forums there, and you'll hit a double-digit number of users who did lose their data. Most important: the developers were and are aware of that fact, and have 'officially' (as officially as open-source-guys can be official) confirmed and conceded this fact, and likewise 'officially' discouraged the use of ZFS without RAID/backup.

I lost one volume, documented there. A Masters student of mine lost 2 volumes; at an exhibition where we wanted to use ZFS for something else.No question, ZFS has some features that are unique and useful. Though not necessarily on a small machine, with a single drive. Hands off in such cases!

That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.

And in the same vein, Btrfs isn't going anywhere, either. Its incompatible license means that it won't ever appear in any Open Source BSD or commercial operating system. Until we get a comparable filesystem under a BSD-style license, no new filesystem is can truly t

ZFS seemed pretty interesting. Btrfs might catch up eventually, but for now it's a loss.

Maybe, maybe not. Given their proprietary nature, that Oracle was not going to put a huge amount of resources behind OpenSolaris was pretty much a given as soon as they bought Sun, I think. What we'll probably see next is an exodus of some of the Solaris people from Oracle to other *NIX organisations and elsewhere, which could turn out to be a very good thing depending on who walks. Since "other *NIX shops" includes

FreeBSD, OTOH, is plenty competitive with Linux, and has good ZFS support.

While I don't think FreeBSD is bad at all on technical merits, and it certainly has enough support that it can't be delcared dead (No matter what Netcraft says), it's still no comparison to Linux as a whole. Sure, it's on better footing in the server arena than on desktops, but when taken overall, Linux is still far more popular than any of the BSDs. Without some serious oddities happening, I don't see that changing. The Unix-variants are all just too close to each other for one to pull ahead at this poi

Btrfs is a product of Oracle. Oracle now owns ZFS outright and controls the fate of Btrfs in terms of developer resources. One guess as to whether Oracle will remain motivated to complete Btrfs.

If Oracle for whatever reason decides to stop investing in BTRFS, the likely outcome AFAICS is not that BTRFS dies, but rather that Chris Mason and his team jump shop to Red Hat, Novell, Google, IBM or some other Linux contributor with an interest in seeing BTRFS succeed. That's one of the advantages of a collaborative project like Linux which isn't subject to the whims of any single corporation in complete control.

To the extent that there might be a threat against BTRFS, depends on how the ZFS-WAFL lawsuit plays out. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if Oracle settles with Netapp, covering only official Solaris releases, leaving other ZFS versions (Illumos, Nexenta, FreeBSD, etc.) out in the cold, and perhaps BTRFS as well, depending on to which extent the WAFL patents apply to BTRFS.

Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either

Why exactly does Oracle need btrfs now, anyway? ZFS is more mature, and the CDDL is more restrictive than the GPL, so it seems like that would be Oracle's product of choice. I guess Oracle can still sue btrfs users for patent infringement, even though the code itself is under the GPL, but why bother at all? Making Linux a more attractive competitor to their own Solaris doesn't seem like it makes much

It's working quite nice here in my desktop. I miss the extra RAID modes (which have been available as patches for ages but for some reason haven't been merged), the ability to reconfigure chunks on fly, the possibility of setting different compression/size limits to each volume, the rewrite-corrupted-blocks feature and the fix for the hard link limit with backrefs enabled, but since I don't need them for everyday usage I can live without them.

I don't think that much has been lost at all. The situation could have been worse. Thanks to the Illumos project we will hopefully have a living OpenSolars project once again, however without any help from Oracle. I would day that we are still in a very early stage and it's hard to make any conclusions at this point. It will interesting to see what happens within the next year before, it will probably take at least that much time before we can say anything with good confidence.

Opensolaris survived only because of Sun's benevolence. Once the source drops stop, that's the end of Illumos project: its either stuck permanently at whatever the last drop was (especially in light of the binary-only internationalization stuff) or becomes incompatible and then its no longer solaris.

If you were referring to OpenSolaris, then yes, something of value was clearly lost.

But if you're referring to Oracle taking part in OpenSolaris, then you have a point. However, even though few really expected Oracle to do anything useful or significant with OS, think of all the expertise and potential person hours from former sun employees that is very unlikely to come back to opensolaris work. Even tho Oracle hadn't been contributing of late,

To be honesty, I was just looking for a quick summary of why OpenSolaris was still relevant, not trolling. I personally never used it, so I'm not sure of its strengths and weaknesses. Course, the "anything of value" phrase carries some pretty negative connotations, so I'm not surprised I came off as a troll.

Uhm... no. They own the copyright in the first place. They can relicense it on the fly under any terms they see fit, including binary-only-proprietary-release. They are not under any obligation to give you the source code, unless they have integrated GPL code in their codebase. And even then, they only have to give you the source to these.

Also, the CDDL != the GPL. I'm fairly sure you know this already but, Sun originally chose the CDDL exactly because it was incompatible with the GPL.